What Sheryl Sandberg Didn't Say About Facebook's Russia Problem
“Things happened on our platform in this election that should not have happened,” Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged Thursday morning. “We’ve had some problems.” In recent days, the Facebook chief operating officer had embarked on a Capitol Hill charm offensive, which included a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus and a face-to-face to smooth the ruffled feathers of the House Intelligence Committee. Now Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 2 at the billion-dollar social-media behemoth, was on stage at D.C.’s Newseum for an interview with Axios’s Mike Allen, where she was expected to provide some modicum of transparency around how and to what extent the company’s platform was used to sway the 2016 election. What Sandberg did instead, in spite of Allen’s pointed questions, was adhere to her talking points.
Asked three times, Sandberg refused to say whether Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign were targeting the same users, instead pivoting to discuss ad targeting on Facebook in general. “Targeting is broad. It’s used by everyone,” she said. “And I think targeting is worth talking about. Now, we’ve had some problems. We’ve had these write-in fields that never should have existed . . . There’s always the possibility for abuse.” Asked twice more about a hypothetical link, Sandberg (sort of) relented. “When the ads get released we will also be releasing the targeting for those ads,” she said. “We’re going to be fully transparent.”